Richard Barnield (1574-1627), Poems, 1594-1598 (1896). Kessinger, 2010. Courtesy Amazon.com.
Richard Barnfield or Barnefield (1574-1627) was an English poet. His obscure though close relationship with William Shakespeare has long made him interesting to scholars.
Life[]
Overview[]
Barnfield was born at Norbury, Shropshire, and educated at Oxford. In 1594 he published The Affectionate Shepherd, a collection of variations in graceful verse of the 2nd Eclogue of Virgil. His next work was Cynthia; with certain sonnets and the Legend of Cassandra in 1595; and in 1598 there appeared a 3rd volume, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, etc., in which are 2 songs which were also included in The Passionate Pilgrim, an unauthorised collection, and which were long attributed to Shakespeare. From 1599, Barnfield produced nothing else, and seems to have retired to the life of a country gentleman at Stone in Staffordshire, in the church of which he was buried in 1627. He was for long neglected; but his poetry is clear, sweet, and musical. His gift indeed is sufficiently attested by work of his having passed for that of Shakespeare.[1]
Youth and education[]
Barnfield was the son and eldest child of Maria (Skrimsher) and Richard Barnfield, gentleman.[2] He was born at Norbury, Shropshire, where he was baptised on 13 June 1574. His mother died in childbirth when he was 6 years old, and he was brought up under the care of his aunt, Elizabeth Skrimsher.[3]
He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, on 27 November 1589, and earned a B.A. on 5 February 1592. At Oxford he was apparently rusticated for a time. According to an old register of Brasenose College, Barnfield was permitted on 19 March 1591 to return to college on condition of delivering a declamation publicly in the hall within 6 weeks, or of paying in default 6s. 8d.[3]
He formed an intimate friendship with poet Thomas Watson, and later with Drayton and with Francis Meres, who quotes a distich by "my friend master Richard Barnefield" in praise of James VI of Scotland in his ‘Palladis Tamia,’ 1598 (p. 629).[3]
Career[]
In November 1594 Barnfield published his debut volume, The Affectionate Shepherd, a series of gracefully written variations on the 2nd eclogue of Virgil. This book was dedicated to the famous Penelope, Lady Rich. In January of the ensuing year, he published another volume, Cynthia; with certain sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra.[3]
This was followed, in 1598, by a 3rd volume, consisting of 4 thin pamphlets in verse, bound together, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, The Complaint of Poetry, Conscience and Covetousness, and Poems in Divers Humours. In the last of these are found the pieces (the sonnet "If music and sweet poetry agree," and the ode "As it fell upon a day’) which appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, and were long attributed to Shakespeare. A copy of an edition of this volume, without a title-page, in Malone's collection at the Bodleian library, contains some additional verses.[3]
Later life[]
After this publication Barnfield disappears from sight. He seems to have settled down as a country gentleman at his mansion of Darlaston, in the parish of Stone, Staffordshire. We learn from his will, dated 26 February 1626-7, and from the inventory of his goods, that he was in affluent circumstances.[3]
He was buried in the church of St. Michael's, Stone, on 6 March 1627, at the age of 53.[3]
Writing[]
The writings of Barnfield have always been excessively rare. Of his 3 books, and of the 2nd edition of the 3rd (published in 1605), only 5 original copies in all are known to exist.[3]
All his best early pieces, and especially his sonnets, are dedicated to a sentiment of friendship so exaggerated as to remove them beyond wholesome sympathy. Even in the Elizabethan age, when great warmth and candor were permitted, the tone of these sonnets was felt to be unguarded. It is only of late that something like justice has been done to the great poetical qualities of Barnfield, to his melody, picturesqueness, and limpid sweetness.[3]
That he had some personal relations with Shakespeare seems almost certain, and the disputed authorship of the particular pieces mentioned above has attracted students to Barnfield's name. It is no small honor to have written poems which everyone, until our own day, has been content to suppose were Shakespeare's.[3]
A curious manuscript in cipher in the Bodleian Library (MS. Ashmol. 1152, xii.) dated 1605, contains Barnfield's Lady Pecunia, Conscience and Covetousness, Complaint of Poetry, and a Remembrance of some English Poets, viz. Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and Shakspeare.[3]
Critical introduction[]
Barnfield is a poet whose personality has only of late years emerged into something like distinctness, his best poems having till recently had the honor of bearing Shakespeare’s name. The reprint of The Affectionate Shepherd by Mr. Halliwell in 1845, from the almost unique copy in Sion College Library, first made Barnfield known to modern readers; about the same time doubts began to arise concerning the authorship of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrim; and lately, in 1876, Mr. Grosart was able to print for the Roxburghe Club the complete poems, together with a number of facts about Barnfield’s family and a few about his life.
Of the latter we learn only that he belonged to a good Staffordshire family; that he became a member of Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1589; that on leaving Oxford he passed several years in London, apparently as a member of that literary circle of which Lady Rich, Sidney’s ‘Stella,’ was the centre; and that after 1605 he disappeared, probably retiring like Shakespeare to his country home, but unlike him sending forth no poetic utterance into the world.
The oddity of Barnfield’s principal performance, The Affectionate Shepherd, is best explained by the date of its composition. He was not 20 when he wrote it; and we are thus more inclined to tolerate both the sentiment (it is an elaborate expansion of Virgil’s 2nd eclogue), and the boyishness and incongruities which mar the execution. It is strange enough that such a poem should be dedicated to a lady (Lady Rich); stranger still that it should open with what must have read like a caricature of that lady’s own love-story; strangest of all that Daphnis, after displaying all his Arcadian blandishments in vain through a hundred stanzas, should turn moralist and flood the obdurate Ganymede with ‘lere I learned from a Beldame Trot’—didactic ‘lere,’ of which these lines are a fair example:—
‘Be patient in extreame adversitie,
Man’s chiefest credit growes by dooing well,
Be not high minded in prosperitie,
Falshood abhorre, no lying fable tell,
Give not thyselfe to sloth, the sinke of shame,
The moath of Time, the enemie to Fame!’
Yet the poem has qualities which mark it out from the mass of Elizabethan pastoral. It has fluency, music, colour. Barnfield combines in it a mastery of euphuistic antithesis with a real knowledge of the country and its sights and sounds; its "scarlet-dyed carnation bleeding yet," its "fine ruffe-footed Doves," its "curds and clowted creme," the ‘lyme-twigs and fine sparrow calles’ for the birdcatcher, the "springes in a frostie night" that take the woodcock. It is to be regretted that this eye for nature, this fine ear and honeyed tongue, were pressed into the service of a design too artificial and too alien from the common feeling of mankind.
There is nothing of this sort to say against the well-known "Ode" ... which is indeed in no respect unworthy of the great name to which it was so long attributed. From its happy union of ethical matter and fanciful form, from its strongly personal note, it ranks among the most interesting of the productions of the lesser Elizabethans.[4]
Recognition[]
Barnfield's Lady Pecunia and The Complaint of Poetry were used as sample texts by the early 17th-century phonetician Robert Robinson for his invented phonetic script.[5]
His poem "Philomel" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.[6]
Publications[]
- The Affectionate Shepheard: Containing the complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede (anonymous). London: Iohn Danter for T. Gubbin & E. Newman, 1594.
- Cynthia, with certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra. London: printed for Humfrey Lownes, 1595
- appended to the third edition of The Affectionate Shepheard, 1596.[7]
- The Encomium of Lady Pecunia; or, The praise of money: The Complaint of poetrie for the death of liberalitie, i.e. The combat betweene conscience and covetuousness in the minde of man; with Poems in divers humors. London; G.S. for Iohn Iaggard, 1598.
- Poems. Auchinleck, Scotland, UK: Alexander Boswell, 1816.
- Complete Poems (edited by Alexander Balloch Grosart). London: J.B. Nichols, 1876.
- Poems, 1594-1598 (edited by Edward Arber). Westminster: Constable, 1896.
- Poems (edited by Montague Summers). London: Fortune Press, 1936.
- Complete Poems (edited by George Klawitter). Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1990.
The Sonnets of Richard Barnfield (Abridged)
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[8]
Poems[]
See also[]
References[]
Gosse, Edmund (1885) "Barnfield, Richard" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 3 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 262-263
Notes[]
- ↑ John William Cousin, "Barnfield, Richard," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910, 26. Web, Dec. 10, 2017.
- ↑ Gosse, 262.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 Gosse, 263.
- ↑ from Thomas Humphry Ward, "Critical Introduction: Richard Barnfield (1574–1627)," The English Poets: Selections with critical introductions (edited by Thomas Humphry Ward). New York & London: Macmillan, 1880-1918. Web, Jan. 13, 2016.
- ↑ Richard Barnfield, Wikipedia, November 26, 2017. Web, Dec. 10, 2017.
- ↑ "Philomel", Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch). Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1919. Bartleby.com, Web, May 4, 2012.
- ↑ Philip Bliss, Richard Barnfield, English Poetry 1579-1830: Spenser and the Tradition, University of Vermont, Vt.edu, Web, Mar. 24, 2012.
- ↑ Search results = au:Richard Barnfield, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Libary Center Inc. Web, Jan. 17, 2016.
External links[]
- Poems
- "Philomel"
- Cynthia"
- Barnfield, Richard (1574-ca.1620) (2 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
- Richard Barnfield 1574-1627 at the Poetry Foundation
- Barnfield in The English Poets: An anthology: Sonnet from Cynthia: ‘Beauty and Majesty are fallen at odds’
- Extracts from Poems in Divers Humors: Sonnet to His Friend Maister R.L.: ‘If music and sweet poetry agree’, An Ode: ‘As it fell upon a day’
- Richard Barnfield at PoemHunter (5 poems)
- Richard Barnfield at Poetry Nook (43 poems)
- Audio / video
- Richard Barnfield poems at YouTube
- Books
- Works by Richard Barnfield at Project Gutenberg
- Richard Barnfield at Amazon.com
- About
- Barnfield, Richard in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
- Richard Barnfield (1574-1627) at English Poetry, 1579-1830
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Barnfield, Richard
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